Title: "There are a number of signs that B.C. has entered into a 3rd Omicron wave"

URL: https://twitter.com/j_mcelroy/status/1544054073187479552/

Description: Justin McElroy on Twitter: "There are a number of signs that B.C. has entered into a 3rd Omicron wave, the length and severity of which is yet to be determined. Let's take a look at what we know at the moment. / #COVID19 measurements have risen in four of Metro Vancouver's five wastewater treatment plants the last two weeks. Prior to this, only one had been going up, the rest falling or stable. Thus far it has not been a huge spike up, but we've been down this road before. / In addition, hospitalizations had been dropping for the last six weeks. But that trend stopped last week — which by itself might not be a huge worry, but combined with global tends and local wastewater measurements, should give pause. / Lagging effects being what they are, we've seen in the last couple weeks a big fall in immediate deaths attributed to COVID. Hard to do comparisons because of the government changing measurements, but 2nd Omicron wave was similar to the 1st Omicron wave in terms of deaths. / Many places are seeing similar waves at the moment, driven by BA.4 or BA.5 variants. It's showing signs of being more transmissible and dangerous than BA.2, which fuelled B.C.'s second Omicron wave in March/April. So what is the B.C. government doing? / At this point, B.C. isn't providing data on the newest Omicron variants. One can see the growing "Other" section of variants in the chart and probably put two and two together, but it's another way in which B.C.'s lack of data makes it hard to paint a full picture. / At this point, B.C. has provided the lowest number of 4th doses of any Canadian province releasing data. Given the high numbers of British Columbians who received 1st/2nd/3rd doses, this is likely a result of government strategy to restrict access relative to the rest of Canada / Forecasting what comes next is difficult for a few reasons: - Few countries have seen a BA 4/5 plateau yet - Countries have quite different immunity profiles at this point - The quality of B.C.'s public data, which was uhhhh open to debate at the best of times, is much lower now / Will be worth watching if B.C. changes its 4th dose strategy soon, if BA 4/5 waves plateau in other countries, and what that plateau looks like in terms of health outcomes. But in the short-term hard to imagine a scenario where transmission in B.C. doesn't go up. k thread over"

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Subject:   Omicron Variant,  Variants of Concern,  Province of British Columbia,  Wastewater Surveillance,  Vaccinations